ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the relations between Africa and the world, and strategically inverts the question of what it means to think about Africa in the world into how to think the world from Africa — well aware of the fact that Africa is not only a geographical space but also a series of images and prejudices attributed to the people that inhabit this space and linked to the idea of a separate world. A first impulse might thus be to plead for an African production of knowledge on Africa. But in order to escape from the problematic of origins and closure, Mbembe, following a long tradition of black thinkers from Africa and the Caribbean, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, pleads for an “opening-up of the world” and a shared knowledge production, considering the continent a new centre of thought from which to create a utopian planetary human community based on mutual encounters. Thinking the world from Africa thus implies rethinking subjectivity in terms of the in-common.
